Peer Community In (PCI) is a free and transparent peer review service led by communities of researchers who review and approve preprints in their discipline.
Founded by French researchers in 2017, PCI aims to build a scientific community-led open access publishing ecosystem outside the traditional commercial publishing system. This new model covers the entire process (from submission to publication) and uses ways that benefit the scientific community to promote transparency, open access, reproducibility, equity, diversity, and inclusion. There are currently 16 different PCI communities dedicated to disciplines such as ecology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and genomics. PCI also includes the Peer Community Journal, a scientific journal with no publication fees, in accordance with the Diamond Open Access model, and indexed by Google Scholar, DOAJ, CAB Abstract, and Dimensions. In addition, there are several PCI-friendly journals, 30 of which are Diamond Open Access, and 55 of which are journals of academic societies or research organizations.
Why does the Library support PCI?
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While publishing scientific articles is very costly for the academic community, the PCI model removes some of the financial barriers, particularly by taking ownership of the peer review process.
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The University of Ottawa Library is proud to support PCI because it's an initiative that moves scholarly communication beyond the traditional for-profit publishing approach to a fair, open, transparent, and community-based model.
The uOttawa Library is also proud to support Matthieu Boisgontier, associate professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences and principal investigator at the Bruyère Research Institute. A champion of open scholarship - including winning the Library's 2022 Open Scholarship Award - he is also the founder of the PCI Health & Movement Sciences community, making him an expert on this innovative model.